{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__futurism_foresight","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"brg-foresight-weak-signal-escalation-warrants","proposal_index":3,"version":0,"title":"Weak-Signal Escalation Warrants","problem":"A large organization distributes horizon scanning across regional offices, research teams, and specialist contractors, but has limited capacity to investigate or brief weak signals. Scanning teams compete for recognition, executive attention, and influence over the strategic agenda. Because submitting another alert is cheap while failing to claim an emerging issue can be reputationally costly, teams can flood the intake queue, relabel shared observations, amplify dramatic items, coordinate endorsements, or withhold provenance until priority credit is secured. Verification analysts then spend scarce time sorting competitive claims rather than investigating consequential change.","actors":["Central strategic-foresight office","Regional and functional horizon-scanning teams","Qualified external scanning partners","Signal-intake custodian","Independent verification analysts","Cross-domain portfolio panel","Audit and research-integrity staff","Independent appeal reviewer","Operational decision owners","Workers, customers, and communities potentially affected by an alert","Mandatory safety, legal, and security reporting authorities"],"observable_state":"The organization can observe submission volume, duplicate and near-duplicate claims, provenance completeness, time from source observation to submission, private contacts with decision-makers, reciprocal endorsements, source-network overlap, warrants used per team, verification hours consumed, evaluator disagreement, selected-theme concentration, later signpost observations, retractions, appeals, and whether prominent teams repeatedly capture investigation capacity. Mandatory safety and legal reports are separately logged so they cannot disappear inside the contest.","consequence":"Unbounded competition can direct verification capacity toward fashionable, dramatic, or heavily promoted signals rather than traceable signals that could change a decision. Alert fatigue increases, subtle cross-domain developments remain unexamined, teams learn to optimize visibility, and repeated attention winners can shape the future scanning agenda.","affected_objective":"Allocate limited weak-signal verification capacity to a complementary, traceable, and decision-relevant set of emerging-change claims while preserving distributed search, discouraging queue flooding, and protecting noncontestable safety and reporting obligations.","intervention":"Create a quarterly weak-signal escalation arena with nontransferable warrants. Each qualified scanning team receives the same small base allotment of warrants and must spend one warrant to nominate a signal for an intensive verification sprint. The base allotment resets each quarter and cannot be bought, pooled, borrowed, or increased through prior victories. A timestamped confidential registry preserves priority credit immediately, allowing teams to disclose provenance without racing directly to executives. Every nomination must state the observed anomaly, independent sources, hypothesized causal pathway, affected decisions, expected signposts, resolution window, disconfirming conditions, uncertainty, and stakeholder risks. Identity-masked analysts score nominations under a frozen rubric for traceability, causal specificity, decision relevance, testability, time sensitivity, and verification feasibility. A panel awards the limited sprints as a portfolio across distinct drivers and decision exposures rather than selecting only the highest isolated scores. Leaders are audited for source independence, timestamps, and reproducibility before selection. A delayed, de-identified record compares claimed signposts with subsequent observations after each stated resolution window; it informs rubric review but does not reduce a team's equal future base allotment. Published fouls cover duplicate relabeling, fabricated independence, brigading, covert warrant pooling, private lobbying, source suppression, and self-generated evidence. Common cross-round screens can refer suspicious endorsement rings or theme rotation for investigation but cannot establish intent. New scanning teams receive recurring qualification windows. Safety, legal, whistleblowing, and incident-reporting channels remain outside the rivalry and may trigger immediate review without a warrant.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Explicit rivalry purpose","domain_realization":"Use rivalry among distributed scanners to surface investigable early-change claims while preventing the pursuit of attention or priority credit from overwhelming verification capacity."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize","domain_realization":"A fixed quarterly set of intensive verification sprints and associated access to the strategic briefing process."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"Internal and contracted scanning teams qualify through conflict disclosure, source-handling training, registry access controls, and agreement to common evidence and conduct rules."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Independent discovery, synthesis, criticism, and confidential priority registration are allowed; lobbying, brigading, fabricated sourcing, duplicate relabeling, covert warrant transfers, and self-created confirming events are prohibited."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Identity-masked scoring assesses traceability, causal specificity, decision relevance, falsifiability, time sensitivity, verification feasibility, and later signpost correspondence without treating eventual occurrence as the sole measure."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process","domain_realization":"A frozen rulebook, equal base warrants, masked review, documented selection reasons, correction requests, and independent appeals constrain status-based attention allocation."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"Uniform provenance audits, endorsement-network screens, duplicate detection, and graduated foul procedures address interference, fabricated independence, reciprocal boosting, and coordinated theme allocation."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"Stakeholder-risk fields, confidentiality controls, release review, and separate mandatory-reporting channels prevent the contest from delaying urgent obligations or spreading harmful speculation."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Equal, nontransferable quarterly warrants cap nominations and force each team to prioritize internally rather than escalating submission volume or promotional spending."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"Warrants reset equally, standings are delayed and de-identified, prior selection confers no extra future tokens, and recurring qualification windows admit new scanning teams."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration","domain_realization":"Resolution-window reviews compare signposts, verification findings, missed signals, harms, duplication, and theme concentration with the arena's purpose before revising quotas or scoring."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes qualification, warrant use, evidence requirements, allowed conduct, scoring, tie-breaks, confidentiality, corrections, and appeals before quarterly nominations are reviewed.","counterfactual_removal":"Without binding common rules, prominent teams or reviewers could redefine acceptable evidence and selection criteria around favored signals after submissions arrive."},{"mechanism_slug":"spending_cap_or_resource_cap","role":"Imposes an equal, nontransferable nomination-warrant budget that limits how much of the shared verification queue any team can contest during a quarter.","counterfactual_removal":"Teams could flood the queue or escalate promotional effort simply to avoid being outnumbered, consuming verification capacity without adding distinct information."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Selects a set of verification sprints for complementary drivers, time horizons, affected decisions, and stakeholder exposures rather than mechanically taking the top isolated scores.","counterfactual_removal":"Closely related signals from a fashionable theme could consume all verification slots even when their marginal contribution is redundant."},{"mechanism_slug":"ranked_leaderboard_with_audit","role":"Creates delayed, de-identified standings for nomination quality and later signpost correspondence, while auditing leading entries for timestamps, provenance, source independence, and reproducibility.","counterfactual_removal":"Recognition could accrue to unsupported or selectively reported claims, while immediate unaudited rankings would reward whoever best games visible scoring features."},{"mechanism_slug":"sabotage_or_foul_penalty_schedule","role":"Precommits graduated consequences for fabricated sources, duplicate relabeling, lobbying, brigading, covert warrant pooling, suppression of provenance, or manipulation of confirming evidence.","counterfactual_removal":"Off-arena attention tactics could remain a practical route to securing a verification sprint because misconduct would lack predictable consequences."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Applies the same cross-round screens to all teams for reciprocal endorsements, coordinated abstention, repeated theme rotation, shared-source disguising, or covert warrant transfers and refers anomalies to independent inquiry.","counterfactual_removal":"Nominally independent teams could divide the signal agenda or manufacture corroboration in ways that isolated review of individual nominations would not reveal."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Provides recurring qualification periods through which new regional, disciplinary, or external scanning teams can enter the arena under the same requirements.","counterfactual_removal":"The original set of scanners could turn registry access and procedural familiarity into a closed attention cartel even though warrants reset."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Reviews verification findings, later signposts, false escalations, missed mandatory signals, stakeholder harms, duplication, concentration, and evaluator burden before revising or retiring the arena.","counterfactual_removal":"The organization could continue optimizing a nomination proxy after it stopped identifying useful signals or began displacing urgent noncontestable work."}],"causal_chain":["Limited verification capacity and reputational competition make executive attention a scarce prize, while unrestricted nominations let teams shift screening costs onto the central foresight office.","A confidential timestamped registry protects priority credit, reducing the incentive to withhold provenance or rush an immature claim directly to executives.","Equal nontransferable warrants cap each team's use of the contest and force internal comparison among its own candidate signals before consuming shared verification capacity.","Frozen evidence requirements, identity masking, source audits, and foul enforcement make traceable, testable claims a more reliable route to selection than visibility, duplication, lobbying, or fabricated corroboration.","Portfolio selection distributes verification across distinct causal drivers and decision exposures rather than allowing one promoted theme to capture the queue.","Separate mandatory-reporting channels prevent safety, legal, security, and whistleblowing obligations from becoming contingent on winning the foresight contest.","Delayed signpost review, equal quota resets, challenger access, and post-cycle evaluation preserve learning without converting past success into permanent control of the scanning agenda.","If strategic adaptation reconnects selection with attention gaming or creates unacceptable missed-signal risk, the organization revises the rules or retires the warrant arena."],"baseline":"Scanning teams send signals to a shared inbox, dashboard, or executive briefing channel whenever they judge an item important. Analysts triage submissions using evolving criteria while sender identities, organizational status, repetition, and presentation quality remain visible. Teams face no common nomination limit, priority credit is informal, duplicate claims are reconciled manually, cross-team endorsement patterns are not consistently reviewed, and later outcomes are discussed selectively rather than through precommitted resolution windows.","nearest_rivals":["An unrestricted weak-signal inbox maximizes access but externalizes nomination and duplication costs onto a limited verification team and leaves attention rivalry unmanaged.","A centralized horizon-scanning unit removes competition among distributed teams but narrows the search perimeter and concentrates authority over what counts as an emerging issue.","A prediction market aggregates beliefs about resolvable propositions but requires tradable questions and payoffs; it does not govern provenance, investigation capacity, confidential weak signals, or noncontestable reporting duties.","Automated anomaly detection can rank unusual observations at scale but does not establish causal relevance, allocate scarce human verification among strategic claimants, or provide due process for rejected nominations.","Rotating verification slots equally among teams protects access but does not require teams to prioritize scarce nominations or select a complementary cross-team portfolio.","A conventional innovation suggestion scheme collects ideas and rewards participation but does not preserve timestamped warning credit, require falsifiable signposts, or govern rivalry over early-warning attention."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal's specific contrast is a governed attention contest in which scarce, equal nomination rights constrain distributed weak-signal escalation, confidential registration separates priority credit from premature publicity, and later signpost review tests the arena without entrenching winners. It is not merely a signal database, forecasting tournament, centralized triage rule, or automated ranking system.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The central strategic-foresight office may administer the registry and recommend verification sprints. Operational decision owners retain authority over responses, while designated safety, legal, security, and whistleblowing authorities control noncontestable reports. Screeners and auditors may refer anomalies but cannot determine misconduct, suppress mandatory reports, publish sensitive claims, or direct operational action.","authorized_first_step":"Replay a bounded historical or synthetic signal stream through a paper version of the warrant arena. Give simulated teams equal warrants, mask identities, apply the draft rubric and portfolio rule, and compare the selected verification queue with the archived baseline without changing current intake, recognition, employment, contracting, or operational decisions.","excluded_actions":["Requiring a warrant for safety, legal, security, incident, or whistleblowing reports","Using pilot standings for compensation, promotion, discipline, contract renewal, or public reputation","Publishing unresolved weak signals or identifying affected communities without authorized review","Treating duplicate detection, endorsement patterns, or shared sources as proof of collusion","Allowing warrants to be purchased, traded, pooled, borrowed, or awarded according to team status","Automatically executing operational responses because a signal wins a verification sprint","Penalizing a good-faith nomination solely because the anticipated event does not occur","Changing scoring weights after reviewer access to team identities or outcomes"],"halt_rollback":"Halt the pilot if a mandatory report is delayed, confidential sources are exposed, identity masking fails materially, evaluator conflicts remain unresolved, a team can acquire extra warrants, or the rubric must be materially changed after results are visible. Void all pilot standings, restore unrestricted existing intake, preserve mandatory channels, quarantine sensitive materials, notify affected participants, and require independent approval before another test."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that verification capacity is not scarce, teams do not compete for attention or recognition, submissions are already consistently prioritized with complete provenance and stable criteria, duplicate and promotional claims impose no material triage burden, mandatory reports remain protected, and no team can influence another's access or outcome. Under those conditions, a rivalry arena would add constraints without addressing the inferred structure.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified if every qualifying signal can receive timely verification, team behavior does not affect competing claims, submission volume and promotion do not influence allocation, and independent review finds no consequential queue flooding, provenance withholding, duplication, thematic concentration, or priority-credit conflict.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is undermined if teams route nominations outside the registry, warrants suppress distinct consequential signals, internal prioritization becomes arbitrary, masked reviewers cannot apply the rubric consistently, portfolio selection adds discretion without interpretable coverage, audits cannot distinguish shared evidence from fabricated independence, or mandatory and contestable channels cannot be kept operationally separate.","risks":["A fixed warrant allotment may suppress legitimate bursts of emerging change within one team's scan perimeter.","Teams may bundle several weak signals into one nomination or use informal executive channels to evade the cap.","Equal quotas may ignore meaningful differences in team scope, source access, or mission.","The registry may become a sensitive map of vulnerabilities, sources, or speculative claims.","Delayed standings may still encourage teams to optimize measurable signposts rather than decision usefulness.","Source-independence audits may penalize legitimate convergence on a common primary observation.","Portfolio selection may become discretionary theme balancing that bypasses stronger evidence.","Smaller teams may lack the internal capacity to choose among signals despite receiving equal warrants.","Mandatory-channel exemptions may be abused to escape the contest or, conversely, staff may mistakenly treat urgent reports as contest entries.","Graduated penalties may chill good-faith synthesis if duplicate or provenance rules are ambiguous.","Resolution windows may close before slow-moving structural changes can be meaningfully assessed.","Verification analysts may become the new bottleneck or acquire excessive agenda-setting power." ]},"next_evidence_step":"Conduct one preregistered paper replay using a bounded historical or synthetic signal stream and a fixed verification-hour budget. Record nomination volume, duplicate handling, identity leakage, evaluator agreement, provenance completeness, selected-theme coverage, verification time, mandatory-channel classification errors, appeals, and which baseline-selected signals the warrant process omits or adds. Use the replay only to test feasibility and failure modes; do not infer operational effect or alter the live scanning process without a separately authorized pilot.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governed an annual competition among scenario teams for three preparedness-rehearsal slots; its problem was pitch gaming and redundant scenario selection, and its intervention centered on masked scenario packages, hidden robustness tests, and rehearsal-portfolio awards. Proposal 3 instead governs a continuous upstream flow of weak-signal claims before scenarios are constructed, using equal escalation warrants, confidential priority registration, and resolution-window review to control attention flooding and provenance games. Proposal 2 addressed incumbent control of long-range forecasting infrastructure and used a fund-owned common data layer, paired production and shadow contracts, displacement thresholds, and transition bonds. Proposal 3 involves neither vendor substitution nor an official forecast platform; its scarce resource is human verification attention, and its causal path runs from capped nomination rights and protected priority credit to internal signal prioritization, auditable escalation, and bounded agenda competition. It can be adopted independently without either a scenario-rehearsal league or a forecasting-service procurement.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Third independently adoptable proposal","Materially different problem from proposals 1 and 2","Distinct intervention and causal chain","Complete arena, mechanism, authority, safeguard, and falsifier specification","Explicit diversity comparison with every earlier sealed proposal"],"conceptual_changes":["Initial version centered on rivalry over weak-signal verification attention rather than scenario selection or forecasting-platform control"],"operational_changes":["Introduces equal nontransferable escalation warrants, confidential priority registration, portfolio-based verification, protected mandatory channels, delayed signpost review, and recurring scanner qualification"],"evidence_changes":["Prior art remains unsearched; first evidence is limited to a no-stakes replay of historical or synthetic signals"],"claim_changes":["Makes no claim of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size"]}}